Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. Under Discussion. 2005. F / d o i / . / / 1 0 1 1 6 2 O C T O _ a _ 0 0 0 0 2 1 7 5 3 3 5 3 o c t o _ a _ 0 0 0 0 2 p d . / f b y g u e s

Questionnaire on “The Contemporary”* The category of “contemporary art” is not a new one. What is new is the sense that, in its very heterogeneity, much present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment. Such paradigms as “the neo-avant-garde” and “postmodernism,” which once oriented some art and theory, have run into the sand, E, arguably, no models of much

CARRIE LAMBERT-BEATTY Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility* There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence, doubt (the common doom), then skepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once again gone through, we trace the round again; and are

“It has to do with the theater”: Bruce Conner’s Ratbastards* KEVIN HATCH Bruce Conner’s engagement with the medium of assemblage was relatively brief—his first forays date to his arrival in San Francisco in 1957, while his pur- posefully grandiloquent farewell to the medium, LOOKING GLASS, was completed in 1964—but intensively productive.1 Among the nearly 200 works made over those eight years, a subset, completed within

CAMERAS, CORN, CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS, AND THE COLD WAR MARK GODFREY “It’s about things not connecting and people not connecting.” —Christopher Williams1 “Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle.” —Guy Debord2 Prologue In the summer of 2006, I was invited to be on a jury of a photographic com- petition at the Museu Serralves in Porto. When I arrived, I discovered that the proceedings

Art in the Face of Radical Evil* THIERRY DE DUVE An object that tells of loss, destruction, disappear- ance of objects. Does not speak of itself. Tells of others. Will it include them? —Jasper Johns1 First, the photos, without interpretation or commentary. Secondo, the facts. Every summer, the city of Arles, in the south of France, hosts an important photography festival entitled Les Rencontres photographiques

Pino Pascali with Colomba della pace, 1965. Photograph by Claudio Abate. From Vietnam to Fiat-nam: The Politics of Arte Povera* NICHOLAS CULLINAN We’re already in the midst of a guerrilla war. —Germano Celant, “Arte Povera: Appunti per una guerriglia," 19671 War, no—Guerrilla action, yes. —Italian student political slogan, 19682 “First came man, then the system. That is the way it used to be. Now it’s

An Interview with Mark Wallinger YVE-ALAIN BOIS, GUY BRETT, MARGARET IVERSEN, AND JULIAN STALLABRASS The following discussion with the British artist Mark Wallinger, which took place in his London flat on June 3, 2007, essentially focuses on State Britain, his eight-month installation at Tate Britain.1 The excellent press release provided by the museum deserves to be quoted in full: Mark Wallinger has recreated peace campaigner

Spero’s Curses* MIGNON NIXON No, I will not challenge the ancient Mystery, the Oracle —H. D., Helen in Egypt, Book 5 (1961) Homage to New York (1958), the work of a thirty-two-year-old, Chicago-trained figurative painter, parodies the mute bravado of the New York School. “I did this painting,” Nancy Spero observes, “with a tombstone right in the middle, and then on each side are two

Vertov: Between the Organism and the Machine MALCOLM TURVEY In every living being, we find that those things which we call parts are inseparable from the Whole to such an extent, that they can only be conceived in and with the latter; and the parts can neither be the measure of the Whole, nor the Whole be the measure of the parts. — Goethe I

Quai Branly in Process JAMES CLIFFORD Viewed from the Seine, through its glass palisade, the museum looks like a capsized container ship . . . in dry dock. Hoisted on pillars, the exhibition plateau seems exposed and incongruous. Red, gray, yellow windowless boxes protrude. Seen from the rue de l’Université, on the opposite side, the long, scored body seems already to be rusting. Three smaller

Klein’s Relevance for Today YVE-ALAIN BOIS In a lecture delivered in Berlin in September 1963, Theodor W. Adorno revisited his In Search of Wagner published some ten years prior. Written while he was living in exile in London, between the fall of 1937 and the spring of 1938, this small, mordant book was branded by the experience of fascism. Adorno was not concerned with the

Radical Tourism: Sergei Tret’iakov at the Communist Lighthouse* MARIA GOUGH Crash industrialization and forced collectivization—the twin and ultimately catastrophic economic policies of the Five-Year Plans of the late 1920s and ’30s— opened myriad new travel destinations for the intrepid cultural worker in the Soviet Union: mammoth industrial sites, monumental hydroelectric stations, extravagant canal construction projects, gigantic collective farms. Tours to such destinations were typically authorized,